Grab an Intel Core i5 14600K gaming CPU for its lowest ever price, now just $164

Intel CPU prices are dropping like stones right now, and the latest gaming CPU to get the bargain treatment is the Core i5 14600K. Now available for just $164, this overclockable 14-core chip makes for a great upgrade if you’re still using an Intel 12th-gen system, or if you want to upgrade from a budget LGA1700 CPU, such as the Core i5 13400F.

As we found in our Intel Core i5 14600K review, this CPU is a great all rounder. It’s perfectly capable of churning out decent frame rates in the latest games, thanks to its six P-Cores, while its eight E-Cores also give this Intel CPU an edge in heavily multi-threaded software over eight-core chips, such as the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. It was overpriced at its $329 launch MSRP, but at $164, it’s a veritable bargain, being less than half the launch price in under two years.

What’s good about this CPU is that it uses the LGA1700 socket, which, unlike some Intel CPU sockets, actually lasted for three generations of chips. That means you can drop it into your existing Intel 12th-gen motherboard as an easy upgrade, as long as you flash your BIOS to the latest version. If you’ve been using a Core i5 12400F for the last few years, then this CPU is a great upgrade at its new price.

You’ll want to flash your BIOS anyway, even if you have the best gaming motherboard for this platform already. Intel’s 14th-gen CPUs went through a tumultuous time last year, thanks to sudden voltage fluctuations, resulting in crashes in games based on the Unreal engine, and even permanently damaged CPUs in some cases. Intel has issued several microcode updates for its 14th-gen CPUs recently to knock this on the head, and these are applied by a firmware update – check out our guide on how to update your BIOS if you’ve never done it before.

Unlike most cut-price Intel CPUs, the 14600K also has an unlocked multiplier (that’s what the K at the end of its model number means), which makes it easy to overclock. By default, it runs at a peak clock speed of 5.3GHz, but I’ve found you can easily push it up to 5.5GHz across all six of its P-Cores, following the same principles in our guide on how to overclock the 13600K, as long as you have the best CPU cooler you can afford for the job.

To take advantage of this deal, you just need to click on this link here, which will take you directly to the deal on Amazon where you can pick up the 14600K for just $164. At this price, the 14600K is even $34 cheaper than the Core i5 14600KF, which is the same CPU but with the integrated GPU disabled. It also significantly undercuts the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X, which is the nearest equivalent from AMD.

For more advice on upgrading your processor, check out our guide to the best gaming CPU, where we take you through the best options right now. You can also read our tutorial on how to install a CPU, which guides you through the whole upgrade process from start to finish.

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